So about that cancer stuff.

[Arthur_Parker]

One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a "do not eat" signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells.

A decade ago, biologist Irving Weissman of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, discovered that leukemia cells produce higher levels of a protein called CD47 than do healthy cells. CD47, he and other scientists found, is also displayed on healthy blood cells; it's a marker that blocks the immune system from destroying them as they circulate. Cancers take advantage of this flag to trick the immune system into ignoring them. In the past few years, Weissman's lab showed that blocking CD47 with an antibody cured some cases of lymphomas and leukemias in mice by stimulating the immune system to recognize the cancer cells as invaders. Now, he and colleagues have shown that the CD47-blocking antibody may have a far wider impact than just blood cancers.

"What we've shown is that CD47 isn't just important on leukemias and lymphomas," says Weissman. "It's on every single human primary tumor that we tested." Moreover, Weissman's lab found that cancer cells always had higher levels of CD47 than did healthy cells. How much CD47 a tumor made could predict the survival odds of a patient.

To determine whether blocking CD47 was beneficial, the scientists exposed tumor cells to macrophages, a type of immune cell, and anti-CD47 molecules in petri dishes. Without the drug, the macrophages ignored the cancerous cells. But when the CD47 was present, the macrophages engulfed and destroyed cancer cells from all tumor types.

Next, the team transplanted human tumors into the feet of mice, where tumors can be easily monitored. When they treated the rodents with anti-CD47, the tumors shrank and did not spread to the rest of the body. In mice given human bladder cancer tumors, for example, 10 of 10 untreated mice had cancer that spread to their lymph nodes. Only one of 10 mice treated with anti-CD47 had a lymph node with signs of cancer. Moreover, the implanted tumor often got smaller after treatment -- colon cancers transplanted into the mice shrank to less than one-third of their original size, on average. And in five mice with breast cancer tumors, anti-CD47 eliminated all signs of the cancer cells, and the animals remained cancer-free 4 months after the treatment stopped.
...
Cancer researcher Tyler Jacks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge says that although the new study is promising, more research is needed to see whether the results hold true in humans. "The microenvironment of a real tumor is quite a bit more complicated than the microenvironment of a transplanted tumor," he notes, "and it's possible that a real tumor has additional immune suppressing effects."

Early days, still, awesome if anything at all comes out of it.

[MuffinMan]

This thread seems very familiar. Deja vu?

[Ironwood]

Wait, into the feet of mice ?

 

[Samwise]

One of our resident biological scientists needs to explain this to me.  So there's this "don't eat me" flag that stops the immune system from eating stuff.  Tumors have it, and healthy cells have it.  If you block it, then the immune system eats the tumors.  Why doesn't it make the immune system eat the rest of you as well?

[Ironwood]

Because that would make a neat horror film.

[Samwise]

Night of the Lupus?

[01101010]

[Arthur_Parker]

Single antibody shrinks or eliminates human tumors in mice at Stanford

Video on the link.

[Sheepherder]

One of our resident biological scientists needs to explain this to me.  So there's this "don't eat me" flag that stops the immune system from eating stuff.  Tumors have it, and healthy cells have it.  If you block it, then the immune system eats the tumors.  Why doesn't it make the immune system eat the rest of you as well?

Although macrophages also attacked blood cells expressing CD47 when mice were given the antibody, the researchers found that the decrease in blood cells was short-lived; the animals turned up production of new blood cells to replace those they lost from the treatment, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

TL;DR: Your body makes blood faster than it can eat it.  Failing that they could stuff more in you.  It beats cancer.

Technically it's autoimmune hemolytic anemia, not lupus.

[Fordel]

It's never Lupus.

[Pennilenko]

It's never Lupus.

That was smoothly delivered sir. Smoothly delivered indeed.

[Samwise]

One of our resident biological scientists needs to explain this to me.  So there's this "don't eat me" flag that stops the immune system from eating stuff.  Tumors have it, and healthy cells have it.  If you block it, then the immune system eats the tumors.  Why doesn't it make the immune system eat the rest of you as well?

Although macrophages also attacked blood cells expressing CD47 when mice were given the antibody, the researchers found that the decrease in blood cells was short-lived; the animals turned up production of new blood cells to replace those they lost from the treatment, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

TL;DR: Your body makes blood faster than it can eat it.  Failing that they could stuff more in you.  It beats cancer.

Technically it's autoimmune hemolytic anemia, not lupus.

I think I was operating under the assumption that things other than blood cells (less expendable things, like nerves and organs) might use the same chemical to protect themselves from antibodies, but it sounds like that's not the case.  That does make this pretty awesome.

[Lantyssa]

Blood replenishes fairly rapidly.  Worst case, the patient gets a transfusion.

[Sheepherder]

I'm wondering how this will affect survivability rate after a cancer metastasizes.

[Nyght]

Modern monoclonal antibody drugs like the relatively well know Avastin, target cancer cells by protein matching on cancer cell receptor sites and attaching verses attaching to any random cell in the body. In the case of Avastin and some others, this slows cancer growth by simply blocking of off these sites and making them unavailable for their original function to the cancer. It doesn't kill the cancer cell directly, but just kind of starves them out.

The newest research in monoclonal antibody drugs focuses on drugs that use the same method to discriminate cancer cells but carry some kind of 'cancer cell killer' payload. In at least one study I am aware of, the payload is a heavy metal.

What is being proposed here is to carry an anti-CD47 payload to the cancer cells, which then lose their immunity to attack from the bodies normal immune system.

Problematic in all these is that metastasized cancers have free float forms in the blood stream which are different in nature from the tumors and will probably require different targeting methods.

This is my layman's understanding of this microbiology and may not be entirely correct.

[Yegolev]

Versus.

[pxib]

I worry about any of these "cures" because cancer isn't monolithic. It's a whole host of different possible mutations with all sorts of different causes and results. The "keep dividing as much as you can" symptom is the only one they share in common, and a treatment that hinders one type can actually assist another... even beside the obvious fact that convincing the body to attack itself is dangerous mojo.

So far as I understand it, our single-cell ancestors centrally competed by out-reproducing for genetic supremacy by reproducing, so if they found themselves in a place where they were well fed it was extremely advantageous to shut down everything except reproduction and go wild. The process of becoming multi-cellular required the DNA to suppress that impulse in a variety of ways, but the idea still lurks there because being constantly supplied by a bloodstream is basically cell heaven. The instruction to be fruitful and multiply is always just one or two mutated letters of code away... in all sorts of different genes, scattered like grenades around our genome. These slightly different impulses can have wildly different results.

Like the article implies, normally the immune system spots that something is wrong and deals with the problem itself. We get tiny cancers all the time and never notice it. It's only particular types of cancers -- mistaken chemical treatments (sometimes by the very macrophages this "cure" depends on) and unusual circumstances -- which cause the potentially deadly condition we all know.

So I'd love for this antibody to lead to new innovations in cancer treatment, but I'm supremely dubious that it's as magnificent as advertised.

[Nebu]

The best we can hope for in the treatment of cancer is to identify any system that overperforms, is overexpressed, or is overactive in cancer vs healthy cells.  We can then target these systems to minimize potential harm on healthy tissues.  Unfortunately, I don't see a way to avoid collateral damage.  The best we can do is find a way to minimize it. 

This system will require more thorough study.  Even if it proves to be a dead end, the knowledge gained will move the ball forward.

[01101010]

And lest we not forget, how much money will this bring to the table? Treatment $$ > cure $$. Cure has an ending... treatment has a monthly sub.

[ghost]

I thought it was all telomerase.